The lead defendant in the case is Catholic Health Initiatives, the Englewood-based nonprofit that runs St. Thomas More Hospital as well as roughly 170 other health facilities in 17 states. Last year, the hospital chain reported national assets of $15 billion. The organization’s mission, according to its promotional literature, is to ‘nurture the healing ministry of the Church’ and to be guided by ‘fidelity to the Gospel.’ Toward those ends, Catholic Health facilities seek to follow the Ethical and Religious Directives of the Catholic Church authored by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. Those rules have stirred controversy for decades, mainly for forbidding non-natural birth control and abortions. ‘Catholic health care ministry witnesses to the sanctity of life ‘from the moment of conception until death,” the directives state. ‘The Church’s defense of life encompasses the unborn.’

The directives can complicate business deals for Catholic Health, as they can for other Catholic health care providers, partly by spurring political resistance. In 2011, the Kentucky attorney general and governor nixed a plan in which Catholic Health sought to merge with and ultimately gain control of publicly funded hospitals in Louisville. The officials were reacting to citizen concerns that access to reproductive and end-of-life services would be curtailed. According to The Denver Post, similar fears slowed the Sisters of Charity of Leavenworth’s plan over the last few years to buy out Exempla Lutheran Medical Center and Exempla Good Samaritan Medical Center in the Denver metro area.

But when it came to mounting a defense in the Stodghill case, Catholic Health’s lawyers effectively turned the Church directives on their head. Catholic organizations have for decades fought to change federal and state laws that fail to protect ‘unborn persons,’ and Catholic Health’s lawyers in this case had the chance to set precedent bolstering anti-abortion legal arguments. Instead, they are arguing state law protects doctors from liability concerning unborn fetuses on grounds that those fetuses are not persons with legal rights.

And lest we think that this is merely some legal trick conjured by the lawyers, the client had to approve this defense from the outset.

There are other potential methods of defending a malpractice suit in this case, but the hospital chain, and the Church official at the hospital chain who were involved in the decision, agreed that they would go against the stated church doctrine on abortion and treating a fetus as a person.

In this case, it was the monetary interests of defending the hospital against a malpractice suit to bring out the hypocrisy of the church on this matter. It also presents a test case to show the limits of church doctrine as it relates to health policy, abortion, and the treatment of pregnant women.

Whether the high court decides to take the case, kick it back down to the appellate court for a second review or accept the decisions as they stand, the details of the arguments the lawyers involved have already mounted will likely renew debate about Church health care directives and trigger sharp reaction from activists on both sides of the debate looking to underline the apparent hypocrisy of Catholic Health’s defense.

‘Apparent’ hypocrisy. That journalistic balance fairy is going to throw her back out.

‘Stodghill’s obstetrician, Dr. Pelham Staples, who also happened to be the obstetrician on call for emergencies that night, never answered a page. His patient died at the hospital less than an hour after she arrived and her twins died in her womb.’

. If Dr. Staples had answered his pager, the twins might have become ‘persons’.

Officials expect 150,000 people to descend on the city for the Super Bowl, and economic impact studies estimate that the game will bring $434 million to the city’s economy. Hosting three mega sporting events — the 2012 NCAA men’s Final Four and this year’s Super Bowl and women’s Final Four — will boost the city’s economy by more than $1 billion, according to an estimate from the International Business Times. And business leaders and lawmakers think the media exposure involved with hosting the big game will push the boom to immeasurable levels.

Those estimates, though, are likely fool’s gold, according to an assortment of academic research into the actual economic impact of Super Bowls and other major sporting events. When professors Victor Matheson and Robert Baade studied the economic impact of Super Bowls from 1973 to 1997, they found that the games boosted city economies by about $30 million, “roughly one-tenth the figures touted by the NFL” and an even smaller fraction of what New Orleans officials predict. A later Baade and Matheson study found that the economic impact of a Super Bowl is “on average one-quarter or less the magnitude of the most recent NFL estimates.”

Similarly, a 1999 paper from professor Philip Porter found that the Super Bowl had virtually no effect on a city’s economy. Research on other events New Orleans has hosted, including the men’s Final Four, is similar. When Baade and Matheson studied Final Fours, they found that the events tend “not to translate into any measurable benefits to the host cities.”

I wouldn’t say it was racism. Not defending it but I don’t think the church was motivated by racism in okaying fascist regimes. I think they genuinely believed that fascism was an acceptable form of government and I think that’s just as if not more scary.

Appearing on CNN Wednesday evening, right-wing blogger and CNN contributor Erick Erickson insisted that humanity cannot do anything about climate change to the degree that people alive today would even notice an improvement, so we’ll all just “have to get used to” it.

Instead of talking to a scientists about climate change, CNN’s Erin Burnett asked Erickson to give his assessment of whether efforts to counteract climate change would be successful. His response: “What’s it matter?”

“It seems to me the biggest problem that global warming advocates have is that every time the conversation comes up there’s a snowstorm, and maybe if it were summer instead of the winter people would buy into it,” he said. “Really the biggest problem is, what does it matter?”

So we’ve gone from AGW is a hoax to some nutter acknowledging that it is real but we should just ignore it? Yeah, that’s smart. Too bad things like ocean temperatures matter a great deal for life as a whole on this planet. Maybe if Erickson actually tried to educate himself on science rather than just dismissing science as a threat to his religious beliefs, he’d know that.

Georgia residents have begun canceling their donations to Georgia Public Broadcasting after a recent report revealed that a former Republican state senator — who believes the United Nations is planning to turn the U.S. into a communist dictatorship using mind control — is receiving a salary of $150,000 to run part of the network.

GPB announced last month that then-State Sen. Chip Rogers (R) would be heading a new initiative to tell the story of Georgia businesses on public radio, but it wasn’t until the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that his salary would be higher than Gov. Nathan Deal’s (R) that employees and Georgia residents began to express outrage.

GPB member Sandy Wood recently cut off her $20-a-month donation and received a letter from GPB Vice President Yvette Cook, who claimed that Rogers’ position would be funded with taxpayer money instead of listener contributions.

I would write a letter back. “It doesn’t matter if you use my money or a grant or had him there working for free. As long as you have that nut working at your station, you’re getting nothing from me.”

I’ve spent nearly a decade writing about Eleuterio Ramos, the most notorious pedophile priest in the history of the Diocese of Orange, a monster who admitted to molesting “at least” 25 boys, a ghoul who church officials—including current Diocese of Boise and Diocese of Sacramento bishops Michael Driscoll and Jaime Soto, and current St. Timothy Church pastor John Urell—sent down to Tijuana in 1985 to ensure he’d escape the law after admitting to molesting a teenager at St. Anthony Claret in Anaheim.

And Tijuana is where the final mystery of Ramos exists.

The Orange diocese’s personnel files on Ramos makes no mention of any Ramos victims based down there (although Ramos liked to take OC children to Tijuana to get gang-raped), and none of the dozens of people who have filed civil lawsuits against Ramos and the diocese of Orange and Los Angeles (where Ramos previously served) ever alleged they were from Ramos’ Tijuana holiday. But the massive document dump yesterday by the LA Archdiocese has unearthed for the first time ever a Ramos victim in Tijuana.

If a pregant woman is murdered the killer is charged with 2 counts of murder —no?

I don’t know if this is so in Colorado Law.

In 36 states and in federal law, but (at least on the federal side) the fetus appears to be granted this status only in the context of injury or death during the commission of other specifically-indicated crimes, and explicitly not abortion.

Really makes me uneasy reading about all these Catholic priests. I know the vast majority did not molest kids but too much were involved in the cover up for comfort. It makes me wonder about my own great uncle who was a priest. And I know that’s not fair to him especially because no one deserves unfounded accusation and he’s blood.

In 36 states and in federal law, but (at least on the federal side) the fetus appears to be granted this status only in the context of injury or death during the commission of other specifically-indicated crimes, and explicitly not abortion.

It seems really, really weird.

abortion is not a crime, so yes, it makes sense.

What doesn’t make sense is the RC Hospital’s stance. Medical negligence may not be the cause of the death of the mother, when they didn’t even attempt to save the fetuses (at 7months gestation), does seem to be medical negligence.

Frankly, if I were the mother, I’d have told them to cut me open and do whatever they could for the fetuses, regardless of an obstetrician’s instruction or not. They had to have had a surgeon and OB Neo-Natal Nurses on site.

As the women was not conscious, I’d think her husband’s word would have been legal enough to do so.

It just seems a little weird that they didn’t do so. Even a non-religious affiliated hospital would so something, I think.

Really makes me uneasy reading about all these Catholic priests. I know the vast majority did not molest kids but too much were involved in the cover up for comfort. It makes me wonder about my own great uncle who was a priest. And I know that’s not fair to him especially because no one deserves unfounded accusation and he’s blood.

It reminds me of the complicity of the upper/middle management Germans in the hierarchy during the Nazi era. Complicity allowed the atrocities to happen.

One probably errs more on the side of trust with the Church. If the higher-ups say they are doing the right thing and show some evidence of such, then one wants to believe.

Don’t forget to mention to Fischer about all the great Soviet women snipers of WWII but of course he’ll probably ignore that just because they were Soviets.

The Russians usually kept women out of frontline infantry units, but did employ them as auxiliaries, such as the famous snipers, but also in combat positions that did not require them to directly engage in hand to hand combat, such as artillery, tankers, and anti-air batteries.

The thing that earned Rick Santorum the rather unsavory neologism was the way he morally equated homosexuality to bestiality, pedophilia and wife-beating.

And to his mind, they are the same, because he sees them as abominations unto the Lord, and therefore, all things that we should outlaw as sinful and immoral.

He believes that we are all free to “obey God’s will”.

There is no arguing with people like that, all you can do is mock them and make them appear ludicrous, and associate their surnames to foamy brown substances.

To people like Rick, Homosexuality is the guys dressed up like women standing around the strange places in New Orleans. Homosexuality = Freak. Any one acting out or otherwise seeming mal-adjusted is a homosexual. God forbid, they look at themselves (yes you Rick)

They don’t realize that a lot of the people they know, that lead normal mundane middle-class lives are homosexuals. They refuse to see.

In a lawsuit that could have a significant impact on the NFL, the family of Junior Seau has filed a wrongful death lawsuit in California Superior Court against the league, according to the Associated Press.

Seau committed suicide last May at age 43. He was posthumously diagnosed with diachronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) last month. Seau shot himself in the chest.

The suit claims that through “acts or omissions,” the NFL hid the dangers of repetitive blows to the head. The AP reported the plaintiffs are Seau’s ex-wife Gina, his children Tyler, Sydney, Jake and Hunter, and Bette Hoffman, the trustee of Seau’s estate.

The Seau family is also suing helmet manufacturer Riddell Inc., claiming it was “negligent in their design, testing, assembly, manufacture, marketing, and engineering of the helmets,” according to the AP story.

On Thursday, Biden took his pitch one step further, reaching out to the hardest of the hardcore gun owner, the doomsday prepper. Asked to square his support for an assault weapons ban with view by some that their firearms will protect them if the world goes to hell, Biden said the two things worked perfectly. If the chips are down, Biden said, you’d much rather have a shotgun.

“Guess what? A shotgun will keep you a lot safer — a double-barrel shotgun — than the assault weapon somebody’s hands who doesn’t know how to use it,” Biden, who owns two shotguns of his own, said during a Google+ hangout on gun violence. “You know, it’s harder to use an assault weapon and hit something than it is to use a shotgun, ok? So if you want to keep people away in an earthquake, buy some shotgun shells.”

I believe argument is that the ban on pork (and the wearing of garments made of two kinds of cloths and eating shellfish, etc) were suspended by Jesus in the NT

hypothetically perhaps in declaring a “new convenant”, and despite saying that “not one iota of the law shall be changed until all is fulfilled”. jesus certainly never mentioned any specific doctrine in the OT that was superseded, except that he was dead set against divorce

in practice this should mean that nothing in the OT has any longer any force of doctrine, and some christians, very few, will hew to this line. for the others, somebody has had the authority to pick and choose which things in the OT are still in force, but who this is and why they had the authority to do this, no one can answer

hypothetically perhaps in declaring a “new convenant”, and despite saying that “not one iota of the law shall be changed until all is fulfilled”. jesus certainly never mentioned any specific doctrine in the OT that was superseded, except that he was dead set against divorce

in practice this should mean that nothing in the OT has any longer any force of doctrine, and some christians, very few, will hew to this line. for the others, somebody has had the authority to pick and choose which things in the OT are still in force, but who this is and why they had the authority to do this, no one can answer

A lot of them can answer and claim that they have such authority. But whether it is in any way a valid authority is open.

DEMPSEY: We’ve had this ongoing issue with sexual harassment, sexual assault. I believe its because we’ve had separate classes of military personnel at some level. Now, its far more complicated than that. But when you have one part of the population that is designated as ‘warriors’ and one part that is designated as something else, that disparity begins to establish a psychology that — in some cases — led to that environment. I have to believe the more we treat people equally, the more likely they are to treat each other equally.

In one way, it does not diminish the power of his message, he was a flawed human being coming to terms with his own shortcomings in light of Jesus’ message as were many other early Christians.

That’s fair enough.

I always look at the story of Siddhartha Gotama, aka, Buddha.

A prince, pretty well-off I’d say, who ditches the wife and kid(s) because he’s feeling blue. Or some existential angst, depending on one’s point of view. Hardly a poster-boy for “family values”, running out on the spouse and kiddies like that. More like a deadbeat dad by modern standards.

But nonetheless, Buddhism remains one of the most sublime philosophies ever produced by men. So even though (like St. Paul), the messenger was flawed, the message is what matters.

When Kholoud Sukkarieh and Nidal Darwish married in defiance of Lebanon’s ban on civil unions, they had no idea their initiative would attract so much support from fellow citizens — and even the president.

The entire process took nearly a year and was done in secret to sidestep political obstacles.

The couple, from different Muslim sects, recited their vows in an intimate ceremony late last year at Sukkarieh’s home with her brother as witness.
…
Lebanese authorities recognise civil marriages registered abroad, and it has become common for mixed-faith couples to marry in nearby Cyprus.

Rather than follow that route, however, Sukkarieh and Darwish decided to work with legal advisers attempting to create new jurisprudence, though there is no history of civil marriage in Lebanon.

Both had their sect, Shiite and Sunni Muslim, legally struck from their “sejel an-nufoos”, or family register, to be wed as as secular couple under an article dating from the 1936 French mandate that makes reference to civil unions.

“Civil marriage for us is not only a marriage issue, it’s actually a Lebanese issue because it lays the first stone of a non-sectarian regime,” Sukkarieh told AFP.

At his secretary of state confirmation hearing Thursday, Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) called out Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) for missing a classified briefing on the deadly attacks in Benghazi, Libya.

Johnson pressed Kerry to commit to finding out what, exactly, happened on Sept. 11, 2012 at the U.S. consulate in Benghazi.

“Well, there was a briefing with tapes, which we all saw, those of us who went to it, which made it crystal clear,” Kerry said. “We sat for several hours with our intel folks, who described to us precisely what we were seeing. We saw the events unfold. We had a very complete and detailed description.”

Perhaps, when the US is long gone and some future historian will write a “Rise and Fall of the US” tome, one of the greatest ironies will be that a political party whose beginnings were built on the assertion that national, “federal”, actions were required (initially for building inter-state railroads, btw) for the benefit of all, would eventually turn against the concept of the US having a central government.

Perhaps, when the US is long gone and some future historian will write a “Rise and Fall of the US” tome, one of the greatest ironies will be that a political party whose beginnings were built on the assertion that national, “federal”, actions were required (initially for building inter-state railroads, btw) for the benefit of all, would eventually turn against the concept of the US having a central government.

Roads are a tool of marxist oppression limiting my freedom to drive where I want. I’ve got a 4 wheel drive SUV and I can drive where I want to like Jesus intended!
///

I can only dream of a day when all incoming Congresspeople would have to take a civics test before taking office..
’ dude.. you think that’s bad? it took our dip shit congressman 5 times to pass his test. ’ Really? Yeah man.. 5 times to pass a high school civics test.’

RUB researchers find altered connectivity in the brain network for body perception. The weaker the connection, the greater the misjudgement of body shape

When people see pictures of bodies, a whole range of brain regions are active. This network is altered in women with anorexia nervosa. In a functional magnetic resonance imaging study, two regions that are important for the processing of body images were functionally more weakly connected in anorexic women than in healthy women. The stronger this “connection error” was, the more overweight the respondents considered themselves. “These alterations in the brain could explain why women with anorexia perceive themselves as fatter, even though they are objectively underweight” says Prof. Dr. Boris Suchan of the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at the Ruhr-Universität. Together with Prof. Dr. Dietrich Grönemeyer (University of Witten-Herdecke), Prof. Dr. Silja Vocks (University of Osnabrück) and other colleagues, the Bochum researchers report in the journal Behavioural Brain Research.

CTE is going to be a even bigger problem among returning Iraq & Afghan vets who survived IEDs:

Carl Prines description of personally surviving 4 IED explosions:

Carl Prine: _Line Of Departure_ One Shot One Kill:
May 17, 2012

It blew to the right, 2 o’clock from the gun, and I’d just taken out the plug to listen to the patrol leader below, twisting the turret and me away from the steel shavings rising like black fireflies from the shoulder of Route Michigan.

Hours later I held a throbbing skull and my left ear felt like someone jabbed a broken chopstick through the drum.

It’s hard to explain the whistle that sang to the back of my soul for weeks after that, but it never varied in pitch. When I closed my eyes and tried to picture it, I saw the whine as a sound that formed into a thin red stream, kind of like water.

*****
It blew at 12 o’clock from the back of my head. The lead truck tripped the pressure plate and we swerved hard left to miss the wreck as the vehicle armor came unzipped just outside Ramadi.

The migraine settled in like fog on a sandstone bank, and I tried to burn it out with Camels I cribbed from the radioman.

Up all night, we ran out of cigarettes.

I didn’t run out of headache.

*****

It blew at 1 o’clock from the gun near Mudiq, a heaving pillar of smoke and rock that fell 50 meters away, pelting those of us in the turrets.

Had Muj not gotten jittery he might’ve gotten a kill.

All I got was another migraine.

*****

It blew at 11 o’clock from my face and the iron, dust and flesh inside a truck that wasn’t really in Khalidiya anymore gnawed through me, as if the sharp nails of a ghost’s claw had to stroke my brain, caress the back of my eyeballs, tickle my throat.

The migraines were so bad that night that I staggered behind a shitter and puked the dizziness out.

You’d do it, too. And don’t tell me that you’d go to Doc because he’d take you off the missions and everyone in the TOC will call you a malingerer or, worse, a coward.

[…]Seau’s family continues to debate whether they also should give his brain to neuroscientists, a problem caused mostly by the fact Junior didn’t leave a note explaining this.

As much as I love them, my family isn’t going to have to make that call. Consider this my suicide letter because I’m going to kill myself.

I haven’t had symptoms in four years. […] But if I slump into dark depression or the migraines return, I lose concentration or start to notice profound changes in the many ways I walk, dream and remember, I’m going to let the .38 carve out my lungs and snap the spine. No matter how twitchy that finger gets or how many times I’ve got to tug the trigger, I’m making a hole no one crawls out of.

I’m not going to be the youngest guy in the nursing home, soaked in his own piss and mumbling at everyone he thinks he might recognize, convinced that he really likes orange Jello while his spoon shakes it all over his lap.

I’m proudly going to be a dozen slices of brain on a slide under a forensic pathologist’s microscope.

Then I’m going to be a report that’s sent in the mail to a VA hospital or whichever Center of Excellence finally decides that buzzwords like “resilience,” a fistful of anti-psychotic pills and a dozen death-by-PowerPoint meetings really have nothing to do with brain science or treating the thousands of soldiers and Marines silently suffering from an anguish they’ll never feel.

Our politicians and generals might never confront in any meaningful way the legacy of these wars just as they really shouldn’t be tied to my obscure fate, one way or the other.